Sweetheart Deal Lets SEC Workers Get Valentine’s Flowers

Feb. 14 (Bloomberg) -- There may still be time to send
Valentine’s flowers to your favorite officials at the U.S.
Securities and Exchange Commission. And thanks to some quick
action by the agency’s employees’ union, recipients might
actually get them.

In what even the regulator’s management acknowledged might
be seen as a heartless move, SEC workers were notified earlier
this week that the agency was prohibited by law from using
government resources for personal reasons -- and that included
accepting and delivering flowers to employees’ offices.

The ban didn’t sit well with SEC union chief Greg Gilman
who quickly fired off an e-mail to his troops telling them he
had demanded the SEC provide “the legal basis for the
assertion.” Pizza is routinely delivered to SEC offices, Gilman
noted, so why not flowers?

Before the dustup could devolve into a hard-hearted legal
battle, Gilman offered up his own bouquet to management,
proposing that union volunteers sit at tables in office lobbies
to accept flower deliveries. “This seems to us a sensible
resolution, and more in keeping with the spirit of Valentine’s
Day,” he wrote.

Red-faced, SEC management backtracked on Feb. 12, offering
a “clarification” that deliveries could be received and
employees would be called down to pick up their flowers.

Possible Thaw

Still, the resolution could presage a thaw in what have
often been tense relations between the SEC’s management and its
union, which represents some 3,000 of the agency’s 4,000
employees and is a chapter of the National Treasury Employees
Union.

Gilman has been critical of a decision last year by
Chairman Mary Jo White to give added retirement and vacation
benefits only to managers. He also recently accused the
commission of stepping up its surveillance of workers after it
released a plan to install security systems in regional offices
that record the times people go in and out.

The effort to clear the way for SEC valentines may be
thwarted by forces more powerful than the SEC’s management, at
least at the agency’s headquarters. A snowstorm shuttered U.S.
government offices yesterday in Washington, and with reports of
more bad weather on the way, there may not be anybody working
today to pick up their flowers.